


The Historian

by remembertowrite



Category: Tanis (Podcast)
Genre: Cannibalistic Thoughts, Demons, Episode Tag: 112 The Map, Gen, Horror, Mental Disintegration, Mental Health Issues, Mild Gore, Psychological Horror, spoilers for Tanis season 1, the tags make it sound intense but it's no worse than Tanis 112
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 07:38:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6557854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>380-44-7583844. Her mantra. Her mind’s lost the meaning, but her fingers know the numbers.</p><p>Or: In which Tara Reynolds descends into madness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Historian

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [my Tumblr](http://surely-you-jess.tumblr.com/post/142670107378/the-historian) on April 12, 2016.

_In Tanis, if they're lucky, your seekers' dreams can become reality. If they're not, the seeker enters a nightmare world, an unimaginable hell of their own creation._

_Your father had a saying he taught to your Uncle, a long time ago: "So as it was, so shall it be. In Tanis, eternal; in Tanis, they'll see."_

    —"Where is Tanis?" by Jack Parsons (Tanis 101)

 

* * *

 

> **DAY THREE**

 

380-44-7583844.

380-44-7583844.

380-44-7583844.

The keypad creaks under her trembling thumb. The four button is a crevice in the middle of the device, concave from the thousands of times she’s pressed it.

380-44-7583844. Her mantra. Her mind’s lost the meaning, but her fingers know the numbers.

380-44-7583844.

She doesn’t remember the name anymore. The Historian doesn’t remember her own name either, but that’s not what concerns her. She’s forgotten _his_ name.

She misses 380-44-7583844. So she keeps dialing, the click of the buttons a sweet reprieve from the shadows cast on the bed she’s lying in and the terrifying glow of red in her peripherals (monstrous eyes?), a sound to drown out the grotesque heartbeat of the not-human tracking her every breath.

_Find me, 380-44-7583844._

 

> **DAY FOURTEEN**

 

The white giant is back. At first he was a ghost haunting her on the first of each year—

Hour? Fifteen seconds? Time is sand, specks that fall through the gaps between her fingers, and she is a thousand years old; she has lain curled and weeping into the faded cotton shift at her neck, picking at the ties at her back so they unravel. The strands feel more peaceful that way.

The giant rips at her arm with his rubbery hands; he tears open the wound but she can’t feel it, she’s numb, she just sees blood spurting onto the giant’s skin and her clothing.

She slaps him with an invisible fist and screams in agony. She can see the flesh torn down to the white of the bone, the delicate muscle tissue inflamed and raw. There’s so much blood.

It’s a reminder that she needs to eat. She tears her food source out of the giant’s tight grip.

“ _GET AWAY,”_ she screeches, thrashing out of the bed.

The Historian makes it to the door, the millionth she’s opened in as many decades, and escapes into the flickering lights of the labyrinth.

Wasn’t this a cabin, once? A cabin that housed a hellish underworld?

A cabin that contains multitudes?

There’s a hand on her should, a claw pierces into her neck, and the wan faces of the other ghosts blur.

The phone in her pocket crunches against the floor as she collapses, and she prays his name over and over: _380-44-7583844, 380-44-7583844_.

 

> **DAY TWENTY-FIVE**

 

The Historian’s last connection to 380-44-7583844 disappears when the blue demons descended in droves: smaller and weaker than the apparent leader, the white giant, they crowd her and slice shallow and sharp into her torso with their multi color claws, rainbows of wrath.

Four of them clamp down on her limbs, bruising her faded skin and suffocating her with anxiety. The one pressing down her left ankle chants in siren’s song, adopting the voice of a mother subduing her child, and it is poison in her ears.

The Historian feels rather than sees the venom draining out of her nostrils as she struggles against the cruel restraint. The demon to her right scrapes at her fingers and wrenches away the machine that connects her to 380-44-7583844.

“380-44-7583844,” she screams at the demons, until their poison finally subdues her and she slips into unconsciousness.

 

> **DAY TWENTY-SIX**

 

She is an atmosphere. She rains and rains. For five days, she brines the earth with the saltwater of tears, poisoning the plants and decimating the animals.

She is destruction.

 

> **DAY THIRTY-TWO**

 

She goes numb, falls silent.

Her heartbeat screams out to 380-44-7583844, but he doesn’t respond.

In this way, the Historian becomes a mute shell of a person.

 

> **DAY THIRTY-NINE**

 

The blue demons have bound her and forced her deeper into the labyrinth. She wonders if she’s on Crete, and they’re taking her to the Minotaur.

But no: The doors are locked in this part of the hellscape, and demons hover over her 27 hours a day. A specter floats in when the shafts of sunlight from the east warm her new room. The specter speaks words at her in a language she once knew, but the words jumble in her ears; she is the fall of Babylon, she is language-less, she is lost.

She shakes her head and waves away the apparition with a transparent palm, but it refuses to leave her in peace.

It sits and stares for an hour until she retreats to the corner of the room and buries her forehead in her arm.

 

> **DAY FORTY-FIVE**

 

Listless and gray, she shuffles along in time with his name, her feet setting the harsh downbeat of a metronome counting out the half-time tempo of a funeral march: 3, 8, 0, (rest), 4, 4, (half-rest), 7, 5, 8, (rest), 3, 8, 4, 4.

The chanting soothes her, enough that only one blue demon is sent to escort her through the sprawling maze of doors to a room with the white giant.

He smiles his toothy grin at her and speaks, but all she hears is 380-44-7583844’s name echoing from the belly of the beast. The horrid rottenness of his breath blows back the front strands of her hair, and she tries her best not to scream.

Screaming means more thin claws stuck in her neck or inner elbow, putting her to sleep.

His terrible hands graze against her arm, the translucent one, and he measures her like a monster preparing a cut of meat for a meal.

 _380-44-7583844, please find me_ , her heart begs.

 

> **DAY FIFTY-TWO**

 

Her arm has changed color: it’s no longer transparent. It’s scaly black like a serpent, demonic and unnatural.

The white giant has cursed her with some kind of magic.

She once studied how people harnessed the powers of the earth, how they worshiped deities to better know the world, but that knowledge has long fled her troubled mind. All she knows is giants and demons and 380-44-7583844.

The giant leaves her to suffer her cursed arm.

She tries to tear at the new flesh with her canines, but it clacks against her teeth, hard like metal and rough on her tongue. It doesn’t taste like herself.

Resigned, The Historian withdraws the horrific limb from her mouth, and prays that 380-44-7583844 will help her chew it off.

 

> **DAY SIXTY-THREE**

 

At first she thinks it’s another demon; but no, he’s a man, shaggy golden hair spilling over the sides of his horror-struck face.

“Tara? Tara Reynolds?” he asks, approaching her with the slowness of a timid dog.

 _Tara_. She rolls the two syllables over her taste buds. _Ta. Ra._

She appreciates the word, but can’t offer her own in return, so she presents her blackened arm instead and motions with her mouth.

The man grimaces.

“I helped Sam find you two months ago, Tara. You’re at Virginia Mason in Seattle.”

Her mouth is a desert; she wrenches her tongue from the roof of her mouth, where’s it’s been stuck for days. Her chapped lips crack in breathy pain.

“380, 380, 380,” she stutters over the numbers. “44-7583844?”

He nods vigorously.

“380-44-7583844 is—is okay?”

The man’s face falls, and she knows, she _knows_ , her heart stops pumping blood and instead rushes saltwater to her ocular facilities.

380-44-7583844.

380-44-7583844.

380-44-7583844.

 _Sam_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. 380-44- is the country code for Kiev, where Sam lives before coming to Washington to find his sister. I made up Sam’s phone number.  
> 2\. Virginia Mason is a hospital in Seattle.  
> 3\. [Carbon fiber prosthetics](https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+fiber+prosthetic&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKtJS7rI_MAhVKNj4KHcbmAkAQ_AUICCgC&biw=1920&bih=943) are black.  
> 4\. Here's your [blue demons](https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+fiber+prosthetic&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKtJS7rI_MAhVKNj4KHcbmAkAQ_AUICCgC&biw=1920&bih=943#tbm=isch&q=nurse) and [white giant](https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+fiber+prosthetic&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKtJS7rI_MAhVKNj4KHcbmAkAQ_AUICCgC&biw=1920&bih=943#tbm=isch&q=doctor+in+white+coat).  
> 5\. My twist endings are officially the worst. It's okay if you groan at me in the comments. :p


End file.
